Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday January 19, 2012 @01:36PM
from the cosmic-recycling-project dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers have found what appears to be a planet so hot it's literally vaporizing, boiling away from the heat of its star. KIC 12557548b was found using the transit method, periodically blocking some light from its star as it orbits around. But the amount of light blocked changes every transit. Given it's less than a million miles from the surface of the star, astronomers interpret this (PDF) as the planet itself turning to vapor, and the expanding cloud of rock-laden gas is what's blocking the starlight. The planet is most likely somewhat bigger than Mercury, but losing 100,000 tons of matter every second it'll only be around another few hundred million years."

Where the hell did this come from? I agree a lot of baseless accusations flying around but what does this have to do with the parent post or the comment by Aeros? Even if Aeros was one of the many accounts you mention I don't see how it is relevant to the post about. I'm confused.

I'd actually written up a long pedanttastic post on how a ton is defined in terms of pounds and is therefore a unit of weight, while a tonne is defined in terms of kilograms and is therefore a unit of mass; but it looks like they've sneakily redefined the pound (in both the UK and the US) to be a unit of mass. The cads!

But as ton can be either 1000kg, 907kg, 1016kg, or even one of about five volumes, depending who you ask, I'd strongly recommend the metric spelling for clarity...

(It is not true I'm a card-carrying member of the Pedant's Society. It's actually made out of plastic.)

I recommend abandoning this imperial crap and sticking to something a little more universal, say SI units. Then noone has to worry about miss spelling a unit giving it a different value, which is only amplified by the two words sounding the same when spoken.

they've sneakily redefined the pound (in both the UK and the US) to be a unit of mass. The cads!

That just means it's meeting the same fate as the original kilogram.

In the traditional metric system, now referred to as the Gravitational Metric System [wikipedia.org], kilograms were used to measure force (and the French root for the word even means "weight"). If you wanted to measure mass, then the "hyl" or "metric slug" was used. It was the amount of mass that would accelerate 1 m/s^2 under the force of 1 kilogram!

The distinction between a pound of force and a pound of pass is just pedantry. Out in space, which is the only place the distinction even matters, the pound is not even the unit which is used. It's ONLY used by people standing on the surface of the planet. For any useful practical purpose the distinction is irrelevant.

Even when quoting the mass of interstellar objects, the intended meaning of "a pound" is the amount of mass that would produce one pound of force on the surface of the Earth. Otherwise, in ord

Even when quoting the mass of interstellar objects, the intended meaning of "a pound" is the amount of mass that would produce one pound of force on the surface of the Earth.

I was born in Perth, Scotland, where g is about 9.82 m/s^2. I now live in Reading, England, where g is about 9.81 --- a small difference, but measurable. If I were to go to Mexico City, it would be 9.78.

Assuming 1000kg, wouldn't 100,000 tons then be 100 gigagrams? I've often wondered why we so readily apply an SI prefix to bits and bytes but almost never to things like grams and metres, apart from only 'kilo'.

Now, with that answered, the question still remains if the "years" are Pan Universal Terran Years [codelobe.com], or local orbit cycles. One has to wonder if they even know what our local Universal Timing Coefficient is.

but losing 100,000 tons of matter every second it'll only be around another few hundred million years

It's numbers like this that really make my head spin.

Yes, I get that planets are big items, and space is big and vast... but I can't even begin to imagine the sheer amount of material we're talking about in even just a few hours, let alone the next "few hundred million years".

Anybody got a car analogy or something which might put these numbers into a little better perspective for those of us who don't work on scales like this?

I can't even begin to wrap my head around it... a google search for one of the biggest things I could think of says that a Nimitz [wikipedia.org] class aircraft carrier is about 101,000 tons. I saw one once, and it was utterly huge.

The idea of something that big boiling off every second for a few hundred million years makes my head hurt.

well, think about (hypothetically) zooming out from the Nimitz on Google Earth - how much you have to zoom out even after the Nimitz (all 300 m of it) before you see the full Earth.

Each 1 km x 1km area would pack about 30 Nimitzes. Each 1000 km x 1000 km area would pack about 30,000,000 Nimitzes. And that's just the surface... The Earth is (gasp!) as thick as it is wide, and denser at the center... So yeah. BIG.

For context, thats about 1 large oil tanker every 5 seconds. Its a lot, but think how puny an oil tanker is compared to the size of the ocean, and then factor in that thats only surface area.

Yeah, and I think that's the part where the ability to actually envision this breaks down for me... intellectually I get what you're telling me. But my brain just sorta wobbles in trying to reconcile that.

I think you need to work with numbers like that a lot before you can internalize it and not get swamped by them..

Imagine a sugar cube, 1cm x 1cm x 1cm. Now imagine a line of ten of them. About the length of your hand, maybe. Now imagine ten lines of ten, on a table, next to eachother, forming a square. That's 100. Like a small square plate. Now stack ten of those squares. That's a cube of 1000 sugar cubes. Smaller than your head. Now imagine a line of ten of those larger cubes. If you spread your arms out a little, you can touch both ends, it's just a metre long. Now imagine ten of those larger lines next to eachot

At my school (and most other schools in the UK, I think -- they're pretty standard) we had "hundreds, tens and units" to play with (aged about 5). Mostly we arranged them into squares, cubes etc -- just as you've explained (though we didn't have a million).

The units were 1cm cubes, the tens a stick, the hundreds a square, and thousands a cube. The "thousands" cube was hollow, and (of course) held a litre of water. Place value, decimal system, and the metric system, all at once:-) Here they are [letmelearn.co.uk].

Wikipedia says the displacement of the Nimitz is 100,000 long tons, which is equivalent to 3.5*10^7 cubic feet. The surface area of the earth, by my calculations, is 5.5*10^16 square feet. If the entire earth were made of Nimitz carriers and the material loss of 1 Nimitz carrier was evenly distributed across the entire globe, we would be losing on average (3.5*10^7 / 5.5*10^16 = ) 6.2x10^-10 feet of material off the top of each one of them every second. Over a year the loss is approximately 1/5th of an inch

My rough calculation is that it's analogous to about one-millionth of a square millimeter of a flake of paint being blown off your car every second. (About the same scale as the Nimitz compared to the surface of the Earth.) It's going to take some time.

What I'm a little wierded out by is that this difference is noticeable by the transit light-detection.

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

And really, it applies not just to distances, but masses, speeds, etc. As a rule of thumb, if it even deserves being mentioned in astronomy, it's frikken mind-bogglingly big.

The Earth, for example, is 6x10^24 kg, so basically 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. Or about 600,000,000,000,000,000 Nimitzes.

Or more to the point of the planet being discussed here, they say it's a little bigger than Mercury, which in turn is 3.3x10^23 kg. I.e., 330,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.

Yeah, that's the kind of numbers that astronomy is about. Well, not really. These are small planets. Now stars and black holes and galaxies, that's the real bread and butter. And you can pretty much stick the zero key down and go brew some coffee, if you want to write the weights for that.

And then come the distances, yes. Douglas Adams was certainly up to something there.

You know where in Men In Black, agent K says, "You want to stay away from that guy. He's, uh, he's grouchy. A three hour delay in customs after a trip for 17 trillion miles is gonna make anybody cranky." You'd think 17 trillion miles is half-way across the galaxy, right? Actually the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 25 trillion miles away. So that alien would have had to make a stop at some cosmic gas station in between, if he only had a 17 trillion miles trip.

It's things like these that... well, let's just say they seriously put the kibosh on most nerds "we should totally do some SF thing right now" scenarios. E.g., since we talk mass, there are all the "oh, let's terraform [insert planet]" stupidities. Yeah, I don't think any of those actually calculated how many trillions of tons of ice comets they'd have to divert into Mars to make oceans and whatever their fantasy scenario involves. (There are 1.4x10^18 tons of water on Earth for example.) Nor where they'd come from, nor what the energy budget for that would be.

"Yeah, I don't think any of those actually calculated how many trillions of tons of ice comets they'd have to divert into Mars to make oceans and whatever their fantasy scenario involves. (There are 1.4x10^18 tons of water on Earth for example.) Nor where they'd come from, nor what the energy budget for that would be.

Yeah, I don't think any of those actually calculated how many trillions of tons of ice comets they'd have to divert into Mars to make oceans and whatever their fantasy scenario involves.

I did that once on an RPG forum. I think I was just giving Mars an Earth-like atmospheric pressure from local carbon dioxide and comets assumed to be about the size of Haley's (assumed to all be made of frozen gasses) from someplace in the Kuniper Belt. Anyway, just to get those comets to Mars in ten years would require the total energy output of the sun for three days. Then I started figuring out how big the solar panels would have to be at a really good efficiency and how long they would have to be there to gather that energy. Then there was the question of the mass of those solar panels and where it all came from the the energy needed to construct them. Ya, mindboggling stuff that isn't getting done in our greatgrandchild's time even if we all worked on getting it done from now on. It sort of blew the OPs idea of a near current terraformed Mars right out of the water.

Well, he was asking what it would take to terraform Mars. I'm not one to be messing with somebodies assumed setting for a game they want to run, but if you ask such a question to a physics geek, don't be surprised when they give you an answer.

I keep hearing about these wild planets and I can't help but desire to see what it would look like (safely) from the surface. The one panoramic picture I have of Mars is absolutely stunning - but relatively speaking, its a somewhat boring landscape. I would love to see Titan for example.

If this planet were a hot car driving down the highway, the boiling mass would be about a 100 bacteria falling off it every second. And each and every one of them is of the very finest British manufacture.

A large quarry might extract 5 or 10 million tonnes annually. Lets say 10 million tonnes for ease of use.That is about 10/52, meh call it 200,000 tonnes a week.200,000/7 about 30,000 a day.30,000/24 about 1200 an hour1200/60 about 20 a minute20/60 about 1/3 a second.

0.33 x 100,000 tonnes/sec = 33,000...

Sooooooo its like about 33,000 very large quarries digging up the planet.

No idea how many we have currently operating on Earth. Of course we aren't vaporizing it and ejecting into space either.

If it was that close to begin with, how'd it coalesce into a planet in the first place? Either this planet has been spiraling in for eons, it's a victim of a collision, or the star has been getting warmer since planet formation.

Well, similar fate waits for Earth (Sun will turn into a red giant), so my bet is the star is getting hotter. When stars run out of hydrogen and helium, and start fusing heavier elements, they get hotter. When the fusion stops, it becomes a dwarf. Of course the lifecycle of a star heavily depends on the initial size, so this only applies to Sun type stars.

You are aware that once our planet spun far faster and that far away moon practically skimmed the tree tops? Things change, the world we know as earth would have been unregonizable a few hundred million years ago, which for astronomy is yesterday.

The title of this article currently is "A Planet Literally Boils Under the Heat of Its Star".. It should probably say "A Planet that Literally Boils Under the Heat of Its Star".. To clarify that not every planet boils under the heat of it's star..

Yes, but that singular noun could be used as a hypothetical instance to describe all such objects. For example: "A doctor makes a good living," or "A policeman is like a vampire: You don't invite him into your home."

Not that I agree with the OP that the headline is wrong or misleading! Because that's not necessarily what the headline means. My point is that it could mean that, or other things too, pretty much like 99% of all sentences in English. Seems like it's pretty easy to figure out which was me

Actually... you may have a false assumption there. Boiling, as described in at least one dictionary, is: "a phase transition from the liquid state to the gas state, usually occurring when a liquid is heated to its boiling point." The kicker is the "usually" part. Many substances make this transition in very undramatic ways and so, in a manner, it could be said that every planet is being boiled to a certain extent just not to the point that significant matter is lost from the neighborhood.

I strongly recommend reading the abstract, it's very descriptive and easy to understand I wish more abstracts were like that.

By the way, what's the deal with describing them simply as "astronomers"? Better than the all-too-often-used "scientists" I suppose, but wouldn't it be even nicer to write "a team of astronomers led by Saul Rappaport from M.I.T."? Scientists are people with names, and the more we use them the more we raise the status of pursuing a scientific career. Science needs more superstars!

By the way, what's the deal with describing them simply as "astronomers"? Better than the all-too-often-used "scientists" I suppose, but wouldn't it be even nicer to write "a team of astronomers led by Saul Rappaport from M.I.T."? Scientists are people with names, and the more we use them the more we raise the status of pursuing a scientific career. Science needs more superstars!

I prefer to call them "scienticians". As in: "Ascuse me, Mr. Scientician, but I ordered this latte with no cinnamon. Can you please re-make it? Thanks."

This universe is the beta version; God had to rush it out because the PHB promised the customer a bunch of features that weren't in the original design. He'll work these bugs out when he has time, right after he finishes commenting all the code for the benefit of the next guy who works on the universe.

I would put all the planets in a egg carton like container and have a heating lamp on them at just the right temperature. I would have to remember to rotate them every 12 hours so people can get some sleep:3

I'm no rocket scientist so maybe I'm missing something here, but if a planet loses mass in this way it should not affect its orbit. Take as an example, lets say some supergiant transformer takes out his sword and slices the moon in half. Each half has 50% of the mass of the moon. That doesn't cause both pieces of the moon to plummet toward the sun.

(circular) orbit is the equilibrium reached when the gravitational pull toward an attractor is balanced by the inertial energy of the mass which is trying to move the object away from the attractor. Both have a linear relation to change of mass of the object in orbit, and the two contribute an opposite force, so if you change the mass, the object should remain in the same orbit. (if you lower the mass, you lower the gravitational attraction and lower the inertial energy)

This is the same reason astronauts don't get hurled off into space when they step out of their spacecraft. And the spacecraft also remains in the same orbit when the astronaut leaves it.

If you want to make something fall toward its attractor, you need to slow it down. That lowers its inertial energy without affecting the gravitational attraction. Or let it collide with a mass that does not have the same inertial vector. (increasing the mass attraction, without an equal increase in overall inertial energy)

I suppose another basic way to view an object in orbit is to view all the particles of the object as independently in the same orbit. Group them any way you want, they are still in the same orbit. Even if some of it turns from rock to gas. The gas remains in the same orbit along with the rock.

I know you're joking, but I can't help but think, "Wait. That wouldn't work. Unless his spaceship is absolutely tiny, he'd be too far away to realize that we've started looking for planets in this manner in the time it takes to for the light from our planet to reach him. At least for most of the stars involved."